Origins of the Raffensperger Family

Genealogists generally take a very methodical approach to family research, starting at one point and working outward to expand the borders of knowledge. In this section, I take a different approach. Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, writes of rowing out over the great ocean of historical material, dropping a bucket down into the depths, and pulling up specimens for examination. This is what I have pulled from the depths so far:

Austria - Bavaria - Hungary

The Raffensp/bergers originated in South-Central Europe, near the headwaters of the Rhine and the Danube. The evidence for Austria as one of the Raffensperger homelands includes an entry in Rietstap’s armorial, showing a Raffensberg escutcheon, listing Austria as the place of origin. Unfortunately, Rietstap does not denote sources for this information. Also in evidence is a “Raffensberg” nobilitation granted by the Emperor Leopold I in 1662, concerning lands in South Tyrol. Various marriage records in Vienna also highlight Austria as a possible origin of the family name.

There is currently an extended Raffensperger Family based in Sopron, in the extreme Western part of Hungary. These are the only Raffenspergers known to me in Europe. They have been horticulturists and we have exchanged some e-mail and letters. The family there traces their ancestry to near Regensburg in the 1700's. See their genealogy on the genealogy page. The family lost much of their horticulture land to the communist regime, but remain in the business.

There has been some discussion that the Raffensp/berg name may have originated from Ravensburg, Germany. This is a very reasonable conjecture, based on the similarity in sound of the German "v" with the English "f". I have not seen any documentary evidence of this connection, however the Hungarian genealogy has a Kristian Raffensperger (circa 1760) originating in Southern Germany, possibly Bavaria. The 1662 Tyrolian enoblement points closer to Austria, as does the Rietstap entry. The identical spelling of the name "Raffensperger" in both Hungary and America indicates a unique provenance, and makes it less likely to be a corruption of "Ravensburg" but perhaps this change came before the family split to different continents. This is a good place to mention that Germany, Austria, and Hungary have overlapped and intertwined for centuries, so distinctions between these countries become somewhat moot over time.

How do you spell that, sir?

If there is one unifying experience for Raffenspergers it is being the last kid in kindergarten to spell our own name and having to spell and re-spell our name over the phone to maî·tre d's, clerks, etc.

I haven't found any verifiable etymological description of what Raffensperger means. Several native German speakers have given me good guesses, all of them different. Breaking the name into parts is useful. What Raffens means is unknown. Berg means mountain, or hill, and is often associated with a fortification at the top of it. The suffix -er, means someone from Raffensberg. So the name is probaly associated with a specific place.

The two most common spellings of the name are Raffensperger and Raffensberger. Felix Gundacker of the IHFF Genealogie Gesellschaft in Vienna confirms that the spelling of names was generally not standardized at that time and that the families are probably of the same stock. I still find it significant that the name as spelled with a "p" exists in several places in Hungary.

Displacement and Migration

Why did the Raffenspergers migrate to North America? There are several possibilities. The Raffensberger family name first appears in the marriage records in Vienna's St. Stephan's Cathedral in 1665, and continues into the 1860's.

This is the first one:

St. Stephan´s Cathedral in Vienna 25.10.1665:

De Ehrbar Bartholomaeus Raffensberger ein Reittknecht, von Untermantz in Österreich gebürtig, nimbt die ehren tugentsame Eua Rosina Wiserin, weil. Joannis Wiser gewesten Gutschi hinterlassene ehliche Haußfrau.

[The honest Bartholomaeus Raffensberger, a serf born at Untermanz in Austria, takes the honest virgin Eva Rosina Wieser, widow of Johann Wieser, a coachman]

Testes Sebastianus Vdalricus Brandtmuellner Petrus

This record is interesting for several reasons. First, Untermantz was in South Tyrol, where the nobilitation was granted just three years earlier. Bartholomaeus was a bonded serf. Why was he displaced? Why do Raffensp/berger marriages suddenly begin appearing in Vienna in 1665, but not before? Finally, how can a widow be a "honest virgin"? Must not have been much of a first marriage.

The Thirty Year's War (1618-1648) and the counter-reformation could be causes of displacement. The Raffenspergers that emigrated to North America were Protestant, and Protestants fled from Austria in large numbers during and after the Thirty Years War. The marriages recorded in Vienna after this war are Catholic, and may indicate the results of the counter-reformation. Leopold I was "encouraging" conversion to Catholicism at this time. The ennoblement mentioned above, and displacement of some Raffenspergers may have been the results of a carrot/stick approach to conversion.

The 1665 beginning date of these marriage records also corresponds with another significant event in Austro-Hungarian history. The Treaty of Vasvár (Aug. 10, 1664) ceded large parts of Hungary to the Ottoman Empire. If the Raffenspergers were based in Hungary (Vasszécseny?), they may have been refugees from the Turkish invasion.

While we don't know which specific events influenced the migration of Raffenspergers to North America, we do know that Central Europe in the late 1600s was a dangerous place, rife with political and sectarian violence. Protestant refugees traveled down the Rhine from Central Europe to asylum in the low countries, with many continuing on to North America. Peter Raffensperger, born in the Rhineland about 1710, may have been a child of those refugees. Connecting him with the family in Austro-Hungary would require further research in Europe and is something that may never be accomplished. Records in Rotterdam, from which he sailed, were destroyed by German bombing in 1940. Many Protestant church records in Europe were destroyed during and after the Thirty Year's War.